Blue Falcon Hobbies Decals

While designed for the FJ-3 Fury, these will be used to enhance my FJ-4s

Yowsa! Yet another company making some high quality decals for our toys! I placed an order with Blue Falcon recently - only having heard of them from a post on the Check Your 6! discussion group - and I must say the decals look spectacular. 

This sheet will save me from having to paint the wingtip and rudder markings!

Blue Falcon produces over one hundred decal sheets, most based on specific squadrons, from World War Two up to the modern era. The print quality is crisp, and I believe that each decal is a separate decal (think Beacon from I-94 or Scale Specialties from same), which means not a lot of trimming around the decal has to be done I'll will update this post once I actually apply some of these decals).

Yeah, I got a thing for those Hellcats of VF-27.

Ordering was a breeze on the Blue Falcon website. Service was good as well - about a week from date of order to date of receipt. However, I also reached out to them about some custom sheets I would like to have completed, and to date, no response had been forthcoming.

A very useful sheet for Korea.

Regardless of my pending inquiries with Blue Falcon, I am rushing back to their site to buy more decals, and some of their paints! You should head there, too! Blue Falcon Hobbies

More Generosity

A couple weekends ago, while gaming with friends at DayCon, I was chatting with one who does 1/600 scale (heathen!) as I was complimenting him on his Battle of Britain planes that he had painted up and used for another event a few years before. For some reason I misremembered them as being 1/600 when he corrected me and stated that they were indeed the Chosen Scale of 1/285. He also mentioned that he needed to figure out what to do with them since he now games in that tinier scale. A few days later I mentioned to him that I would be interested in the planes if he decided to part with them.

Yesterday he brought the planes to me and told me to keep them. Bear in mind these are beautifully painted planes, twenty-eight in sum, and he did not want anything for them! (little does he know I have a cunning plan to repay his kindness) So now I have another theater for World War Two, and what he bequeathed to me can cover a half dozen scenarios from the various scenario books (Over the Channel, Days of Glory, and Battles Above 1)

A Bit More on the Fireball

I have been working on a few additional hypothetical scenarios that feature the Ryan FR-1 Fireball - a piston and jet engined fighter that went into production a bit too late to see service during the Second World War. With the recent purchase at DayCon of a pair of MSD Games F8F Bearcats, nicely painted by Chris at I-94, I wanted to get both the Bearcats and the Fireballs on the table together. 

There is a not a lot of ink on the Fireball - oh, one can easily find numerous images online, but it is a relatively sparse plate in finding printed materials. There are two that I know of that specifically deal with the FR-1 - a Squadron Signal Mini in Action (1995) and a title in the Naval Fighters series by Steve Ginter (Ryan FR-1 Fireball And XF2R-1 Darkshark, also 1995). The Fireball also receives a few pages in the Detail & Scale book U.S. Navy and Marine Carrier-Based Aircraft of World War II (2018). So really the Mini in Action and the Ginter books are the best source books still available today. However, they do not always agree in their facts (mostly when it comes to VF-66 personnel and the number of kills they had prior to joining the squadron).

YouTube has numerous videos on the Fireball - unfortunately a few of them really besmirch the plane as opposed to looking at why it was designed versus the issues with using jet powered aircraft on carriers.  

What I have done, with the use of AI, is to create five "what-if" scenarios featuring the FR-1 and/or the F8F, going up against some of the few late war Japanese aircraft I have (the Ki-100 and J2M3 Raiden). Those five scenarios are now uploaded on the Downloads page, under the "World War II - Pacific (If the War Continued)" section.